Doc1

Doc1

The doctor was a robot: Doc1, the first of his kind. He was programmed with the most advanced AI available. He could recognize not just words but facial expressions and most kinds of body language. He looked and sounded like a real person too, which always threw people off, most not even realizing that he was a robot until he introduced himself as Doc1.

Doc1’s clinic was always open as he didn’t need to sleep or eat or go on vacation. It was planned for Doc’s to be started up all over the nation but for now Doc1 was the only one until his company could find more funding.

This story begins just two weeks after it opened on a Saturday. Doc1 was busy, so many people, he thought. This was what he was built for but even robots can get stressed out. He was just finishing up with one of his patients, an elderly woman who was worried about a lump she had in one of her breasts but turned out to be benign. She was still insisting that he wasn’t checking hard enough, but he knew that some people would get ideas in their heads, such as I must have cancer and even when you prove them wrong they’ll think that you’re lying and that whatever it is that they’ve decided beforehand must be true. He wrote her a prescription for some lower quality pain killers and told her to call him in the morning (he was programmed to say that after every visit, the folks at his head company thought it would make him seem friendlier. Really, it just annoyed the hell out of Doc1).

As he walked back through the jam packed waiting room, escorting Mrs. Nesbit out there was a sudden noise from near the back of the room that his program told him was the sound of an FN P90 submachine gun followed by a loud, deep man’s voice, “EVERYONE ON THE GROUND THIS IS A ROBBERY!”

Doc1 watched as some people around the man jumped to the ground, others closer to the door got away. Most of the people just started to panic so the man said again, “EVERYONE GET ON THE FUCKING GROUND!” and then, to show how serious he was he fired the gun into the air causing one of the women lying on the ground next to him to get up and start running towards the door. The guy pointed his gun at her and prepared to fire. Doc1, faster than anything living can move on the face of the planet, was there in between the women and the man with the gun just as he fired. Doc1 simply caught the bullet right out of the air in his fingers.

The man with the gun seemed confused, he stared at Doc1 with a look on his face which said I can’t even conceive what just happened. “Who the fuck are you?” he asked, still pointing the gun at him.

”I’m the Doctor here, this is my clinic.”

The man’s grip on his weapon tightened, “I don’t give a shit who you are, now get on the ground with the rest of ‘em.”

Doc1 sighed, “You realize this is a free clinic right?”

The man raised the gun higher, so he could view the Doc down the sights, “What if it is?”

“No one here has any money, and I don’t get paid so you know I don’t have anything either.”

The man laughed, “Then I am going to kill each and every person here.”

At this Doc1 moved forwards so fast the man didn’t even have time to react. He immediately ripped the gun out of the man’s clutches and quickly disassembled it with his left hand. His right arm he used to gripped the man around his neck and held him in a sleeper hold. As the gunman lost consciousness the Doc whispered in his ear, “Take two of these and call me in the morning.”